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Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
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Product Description
A revelatory examination of how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for ill
A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each other online and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design in decades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blog after 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering the Iraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to bring offensive comments made by Trent Lott and Don Imus to a wide public and hound them from their positions. A few people find that a world-class online encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers and open for editing by anyone, a wiki, is not an impractical idea. Jihadi groups trade inspiration and instruction and showcase terrorist atrocities to the world, entirely online. A wide group of unrelated people swarms to a Web site about the theft of a cell phone and ultimately goads the New York City police to take action, leading to the culprit's arrest.
With accelerating velocity, our age's new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old things better and more easily. You don't have to have a MySpace page to know that the times they are a changin'. Hierarchical structures that exist to manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d'tre swiftly eroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is profound.
One of the culture's wisest observers of the transformational power of the new forms of tech-enabled social interaction is Clay Shirky, and Here Comes Everybody is his marvelous reckoning with the ramifications of all this on what we do and who we are. Like Lawrence Lessig on the effect of new technology on regimes of cultural creation, Shirky's assessment of the impact of new technology on the nature and use of groups is marvelously broad minded, lucid, and penetrating; it integrates the views of a number of other thinkers across a broad range of disciplines with his own pioneering work to provide a holistic framework for understanding the opportunities and the threats to the existing order that these new, spontaneous networks of social interaction represent. Wikinomics, yes, but also wikigovernment, wikiculture, wikievery imaginable interest group, including the far from savory. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1021 in Books
- Published on: 2008-02-28
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 accoutrements are revolutionizing the social order, a development that's cause for more excitement than alarm, argues interactive telecommunications professor Shirky. He contextualizes the digital networking age with philosophical, sociological, economic and statistical theories and points to its major successes and failures. Grassroots activism stands among the winnersâBelarus's flash mobs, for example, blog their way to unprecedented antiauthoritarian demonstrations. Likewise, user/contributor-managed Wikipedia raises the bar for production efficiency by throwing traditional corporate hierarchy out the window. Print journalism falters as publishing methods are transformed through the Web. Shirky is at his best deconstructing Web failures like Wikitorial, the Los Angeles Times's attempt to facilitate group op-ed writing. Readers will appreciate the Gladwellesque lucidity of his assessments on what makes or breaks group efforts online: Every story in this book relies on the successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users. The sum of Shirky's incisive exploration, like the Web itself, is greater than its parts. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"Clear thinking and good writing about big changes."
-Stewart Brand
"Clay Shirky may be the finest thinker we have on the Internet revolution, but Here Comes Everybody is more than just a technology book; it's an absorbing guide to the future of society itself. Anyone interested in the vitality and influence of groups of human beings -from knitting circles, to political movements, to multinational corporations-needs to read this book."
-Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You and Emergence
"How do trends emerge and opinions form? The answer used to be something vague about word of mouth, but now it's a highly measurable science, and nobody understands it better than Clay Shirky. In this delightfully readable book, practically every page has an insight that will change the way you think about the new era of social media. Highly recommended."
-Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail
"In story after story, Clay masterfully makes the connections as to why business, society and our lives continue to be transformed by a world of net- enabled social tools. His pattern-matching skills are second to none."
-Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Chief Software Architect "Clay has long been one of my favorite thinkers on all things Internet-- not only is he smart and articulate, but he's one of those people who is able to crystallize the half-formed ideas that I've been trying to piece together into glittering, brilliant insights that make me think, yes, of course, that's how it all works."
--Cory Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing and author of Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present.
About the Author
Clay Shirky teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he researches the interrelated effects of our social and technological networks. He has consulted with a variety of groups working on network design, including Nokia, the BBC, Newscorp, Microsoft, BP, Global Business Network, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Navy, the Libyan government, and Lego. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, Harvard Business Review, Business 2.0, and Wired1.
Customer Reviews
An Excellent Discussion of Changing Group Dynamics
I am not one to read books on technology, strange as it may seem. Especially ones that talk about current issues as they will become dated in a few months, or less. However, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, by Clay Shirky, works for me on several levels. You could read this book a year from now and still gain valuable insight into the blogging, Twitter, and social media arenas.
Contents:
Chapter 1: It Takes a Village to Find a Phone
Chapter 2: Sharing Anchors Community
Chapter 3: Everyone is a Media Outlet
Chapter 4: Publish, Then Filter
Chapter 5: Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production
Chapter 6: Collective Action and Institutional Challenges
Chapter 7: Faster and Faster
Chapter 8: Solving Social Dilemmas
Chapter 9: Fitting Our Tools to a Small World
Chapter 10: Failure for Free
Chapter 11: Promise, Tool, Bargain
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
The premise of the book is laid out in Chapter 1, where Shirky relates a 2006 story of a stolen Sidekick, a smartphone lost in a New York City cab. The owner offered a reward for its return, sent to the phone itself, but it was not answered. From there, a friend of the owner started a blog, relating his adventures in recovering the phone. From the blog, and the attention that it received, the owner was able to recover the phone. It was done through e-mails, pressure on the New York City police, and the networking between people that cared enough to create an issue of recovering the phone. Blogs, wikis, social networking sites, IRC, and Twitter are enabling people to create communities and organizations without formally meeting or requiring a bricks-and-mortar locations. Examples Shirky uses includes political activists in Belarus and Leipzig, East Germany, Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), and activists in Egypt. These examples, and others, show that Shirky may be right in his assessment that what we are seeing now in "Web 2.0" is as important as the invention of moveable type (the printing press) in 1439. It may be years before you will be able to confirm this, but you can tell that there is a shift happening, using the internet, that was previously impossible to surmount (geography, primarily, but also the connections that we all enjoy due to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and others).
Here Comes Everybody is a very enjoyable book. For those people that need an introduction to the power of blogs, wikis, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other technologies, this book will serve you very well. While not an exhaustive expose on any of the technologies, Shirky explains the rise of them (including a little background on the founders) and how we have adapted them to our specific use. E-mail and text messaging allowed East Germans to help bring down the government in 1989. Twitter, seen as a micro-blogging platform, has been used by democracy advocates in Egypt to notify others of police actions and also to garner support for those jailed during protests. Wikis, especially, are given a high position in the book, as the standard of global collaborative thinking. Wikipedia's origins are shown, as well as why it works as well as it does. But those aren't the only items of interest. One of the more fascinating discussions concerns "fame" and participation. There is a marked imbalance in all of the tools he describes. Some people post more pictures to Flickr, write more blog posts, or use Twitter more extensively than others in the population. This leads to a measure of "fame" in the communities. This is called the "power-law distribution" and actually allows these technologies to flourish. It also allows the major contributors to enjoy a measure of "fame." Reading this, I finally understood why there are so many people that do not contribute to wikis, blogs, or on-line forums. But while those people may not contribute the majority of the work, they do contribute, and they care about the success of the wiki, blog, or forum (for example) as much as those that contribute the majority.
There are lessons within this book for everyone that blogs, contributes to wikis, or tweets. Further, if you are working for a large organization, there is a clear understanding of how these technologies can leverage internal and external experts. It may help your organization to find better ideas from your employees, from sources that you never considered. One of the highlights for me was reading "For any given piece of software, the question 'Do the people who like it take care of each other?' turns out to be a better prediction of success than 'What's the business model?'" As I look at the particular area of technology that I inhabit, I would have to answer with a resounding "Yes" to that question. Which also explains why I think that it is doing so well and will continue to do well.
Highly recommended.
Social Implications of Internet and Glorifying "Loose Collaboration"
Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody is a great primer to understand the modern internet phenomenon. He calls internet "the biggest revolution in human expression", and that it used to be that "Little things happen for love and big things happen for money", but now the thresholds for collaboration and expression are minimal so both things can happen.
The first five chapters is a great introduction to the evolution of media and organizing groups. Even if for my part little was new, it was a great read. The mid part of the book is a long and boring repetitions. The book end with discussing social dilemmas and open source software, which and there were great pages. I just wish Shirky could have trimmed the book 100 pages in the middle.
Since I am in the software world my biggest interest was the discussion around open source software (OSS). Shirky is a great believer in OSS, and states that "In the open source world, trying something is often cheaper than than making formal decisions about whether to try it". OSS means, according to Shirky, that massive amounts of people will try and develop things and many will fail, but thanks to the volume new discoveries are made. He gives the analogy of the arid desert where companies stick to the first oasis they find, but in the world of OSS the whole desert is explored, and therefore new values are found and created.
I think Shirky misses two important things: first, that just because it is accessible (and maybe free) people will not work with it, there needs to be an incentive. Some people work out of anger towards a giant (used to be Microsoft) and some because they want to show off or learn, but miracles need some coordinating party in my eyes (look at Ubuntu, GTK, and Webkit, big successes of open source).
Secondly innovation is not only comprised of technology. Working with innovation processes I would say that simplified there are three parts: Market Fit, Consumer Experience, and Technical Feasibility, where open source is great at the last one, but usually bad at the first two.
To summarize: a great primer about how Internet changed media and human communication, but I think it glorifies "loose collaboration".
Marketers: essential reading before embarking on social media of any kind
I've read almost all the books on how social media is changing business and I can say that "Here Comes Everybody" is the very best. Don't even think of blogs, communities or social networks as part of your marketing strategy until you read this book. Why? It explains clearly -- yet oh so thoroughly -- why people want to connect and contribute(or not)to communities and groups.
It also puts the tools discussion into the proper context: First establish the group's promise, and then select the tool to support the promise. In my experience too many companies are investing in the tools and then trying to figuring out how to create business communities with those tools.
Clay also provides some fascinating insights into what makes a community coalesce: you don't need huge numbers of highly-active people for a community to be effective. Because today's tools remove barriers to participation a small number of highly-involved people can do most of the heavy lifting and "people who care a little can participate a little, while being effective in the aggregate."
Bonus points -- the book is well written, rich in illustrative stories, and well organized.
